Browsed byTag: celestial-cocktails

In the solar system that I grew up with, Pluto was still considered to be the outermost planet, until it was reclassified as a dwarf by the International Astronomical Union. It had always seemed so mysterious to me, sitting out there so unimaginably far away, moving slowly along in its weird elliptical orbit, and making its way around the sun once every 248 years. Okay, okay, I confess that I did not readily know those facts as a child. I became fascinated with Pluto when I was in 5th grade and did a …

When I learned about the planets in 3rd grade, it was Neptune that I fell in love with first. I was captivated by its beautiful shade of blue and by the fact that it was named after the Roman god of the sea. He was always my favorite. Neptune is an ice giant, along with its sister planet, Uranus, and it occupies the 8th position from the sun. In terms of size, if we go back to our analogy of the sun being as large as a front door, and Earth being a nickel, then Neptune would be as big as a baseball. A day …

We all knew someone growing up whose unfortunate name made us wonder what his or her parents were thinking. I always felt this way about Uranus. This is a celestial body, the third largest in the solar system and beautifully blue in color, yet it continues to be the one planet everyone is hesitant to even mention. let alone say is their favorite. It was named by a German astronomer, Johann Elert Bode, and we do actually know what he was thinking. Since Saturn was the mythological father of Jupiter, …

I can remember the first time I became aware of the fact that there were planets out there in space other than the one we lived on. It was a fascinating subject for me, and one that I could hardly fathom at times because of the sheer magnitude of it all. For me, there was no planet that was more captivating than Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, second largest, and, almost without question, the most beautiful of them all. Saturn is a gas giant, much like Jupiter, so it has no solid surface, but …

Named after the Roman god who ruled the universe, Jupiter is the largest celestial body in our solar system other than the Sun itself. It is eleven times wider than Earth, so if our planet were the size of a nickel, Jupiter would be as big as a basketball. It has the shortest rotational period of all the planets, with each day clocking in at just shy of 10 hours. A Starbucks on Jupiter would double its sales volume! Its year, however, is something quite different: it takes 4,333 Earth days for Jupiter to …